2007-04-17
Logical Bloodshed
Here is a quote from the mindset of the Iraqi insurgents which says an awful lot:
"6) Al-Qaeda in Iraq is intentionally targeting members of the Iraqi Army and police forces, who al-Jabouri and other insurgents believe are acting in the best interest of Iraqis."
What we have here is insurgents who support the Iraqi security forces, while risking their lives to kill American "occupiers" who are doing nothing more than helping those exact same Iraqi security forces! If this was a work of fiction, it would be a flop, because it has an unbelievable story line. The insurgents may as well be targetting members of the Iraqi security forces whose surname starts with a vowel, while supporting those whose surname begins with a consonant. That scenario is not one iota more absurd than the real life scenario.
And the equivalent of this weird "logic" is present in the West as well. Saddam's security forces were legitimate, but the democratic Iraq's security forces are illegitimate. That Orwellian world raising its head again. How do people with "logic" like this actually manage to survive? Why don't we find them trapped on escalators, continuing to try to walk up the "down" escalator? Our societies would be much healthier if all these dingbats could queue up at their local escalator instead of preventing us from freeing millions upon millions of slaves.
Illogical people, like children, are normally harmless, but they have become a threat in the West by voting for and being the Democrats, and are directly causing bloodshed in Iraq. Mostly their own, but American as well. It's phenomenal. I am hoping to see some of this "logic" clash in a debate between Waheed and a Pakistani Taliban fighter soon, as I may have just got a link to the latter. Really, where else can you see a debate like that? The actual protagonists debating why there appears to be no other logical course of action than to shoot each other. I'm not sure it will be any different to the debates we have already witnessed between supporters of Iraqi freedom and supporters of Iraqi slavery, but this would have the people who are actually risking their lives in these endeavours, which would take it to another level.
Maybe at some point I can interject and say "you appear to have different definitions of freedom - 'not occupied' vs 'not subjugated'". I'm pretty sure this is the core problem, coupled with bizarre conspiracy theories where Bush is the puppeteer of most of the world, but the only people who can "see" this are those who wear tinfoil hats. But when the Taliban hears Waheed saying "listen up morons, I PERSONALLY support Karzai's policies and voted for him", maybe, just maybe, the rusted cogs will break free and the Taliban supporters will desist. Those precious rusted cogs. If only I could figure out how to oil them. I've been ensuring every last cog in my brain is well-oiled since I was a child, but it seems very few people have made a similar effort (ie, become a rationalist). I even went so far as to try to ditch this whole "care about others" thing that I had been brought up with. Was it an invalid thing that I had been indoctrinated with that I should discard? That one thing - empathy - is the only bit that I was left with, as I set about to derive everything myself. The empathy is probably in my genes in much the same way that I also like chocolate, and is thus not a dogma that needs to be challenged and discarded as baseless.
Now if we can just get one more bit of experimental data - what the liberation of Iran looks like. I want to have absolute proof that we can be in and out of a country in 4 weeks, with all objectives accomplished (meaning the process we are looking for being kickstarted so that the end objectives will also be accomplished). And the only way I can ever get that data is right now, via Bush. My expected results for Iraq were wrong - I was expecting a 95% approval rating and instead we only got 50% - why was the approval rating higher in Afghanistan when Saddam arguably had the crueler government? Anyway, I hope Bush is doing the same countdown to full Iraqi control due in November that I am. We could actually have this last bit of data within a year, when the Iranian opinion polls come out in an environment of freedom. It'll take longer than that to get them validated via secret ballot though. But preliminary data would still be great. Just as the Iraqi data was.
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"6) Al-Qaeda in Iraq is intentionally targeting members of the Iraqi Army and police forces, who al-Jabouri and other insurgents believe are acting in the best interest of Iraqis."
What we have here is insurgents who support the Iraqi security forces, while risking their lives to kill American "occupiers" who are doing nothing more than helping those exact same Iraqi security forces! If this was a work of fiction, it would be a flop, because it has an unbelievable story line. The insurgents may as well be targetting members of the Iraqi security forces whose surname starts with a vowel, while supporting those whose surname begins with a consonant. That scenario is not one iota more absurd than the real life scenario.
And the equivalent of this weird "logic" is present in the West as well. Saddam's security forces were legitimate, but the democratic Iraq's security forces are illegitimate. That Orwellian world raising its head again. How do people with "logic" like this actually manage to survive? Why don't we find them trapped on escalators, continuing to try to walk up the "down" escalator? Our societies would be much healthier if all these dingbats could queue up at their local escalator instead of preventing us from freeing millions upon millions of slaves.
Illogical people, like children, are normally harmless, but they have become a threat in the West by voting for and being the Democrats, and are directly causing bloodshed in Iraq. Mostly their own, but American as well. It's phenomenal. I am hoping to see some of this "logic" clash in a debate between Waheed and a Pakistani Taliban fighter soon, as I may have just got a link to the latter. Really, where else can you see a debate like that? The actual protagonists debating why there appears to be no other logical course of action than to shoot each other. I'm not sure it will be any different to the debates we have already witnessed between supporters of Iraqi freedom and supporters of Iraqi slavery, but this would have the people who are actually risking their lives in these endeavours, which would take it to another level.
Maybe at some point I can interject and say "you appear to have different definitions of freedom - 'not occupied' vs 'not subjugated'". I'm pretty sure this is the core problem, coupled with bizarre conspiracy theories where Bush is the puppeteer of most of the world, but the only people who can "see" this are those who wear tinfoil hats. But when the Taliban hears Waheed saying "listen up morons, I PERSONALLY support Karzai's policies and voted for him", maybe, just maybe, the rusted cogs will break free and the Taliban supporters will desist. Those precious rusted cogs. If only I could figure out how to oil them. I've been ensuring every last cog in my brain is well-oiled since I was a child, but it seems very few people have made a similar effort (ie, become a rationalist). I even went so far as to try to ditch this whole "care about others" thing that I had been brought up with. Was it an invalid thing that I had been indoctrinated with that I should discard? That one thing - empathy - is the only bit that I was left with, as I set about to derive everything myself. The empathy is probably in my genes in much the same way that I also like chocolate, and is thus not a dogma that needs to be challenged and discarded as baseless.
Now if we can just get one more bit of experimental data - what the liberation of Iran looks like. I want to have absolute proof that we can be in and out of a country in 4 weeks, with all objectives accomplished (meaning the process we are looking for being kickstarted so that the end objectives will also be accomplished). And the only way I can ever get that data is right now, via Bush. My expected results for Iraq were wrong - I was expecting a 95% approval rating and instead we only got 50% - why was the approval rating higher in Afghanistan when Saddam arguably had the crueler government? Anyway, I hope Bush is doing the same countdown to full Iraqi control due in November that I am. We could actually have this last bit of data within a year, when the Iranian opinion polls come out in an environment of freedom. It'll take longer than that to get them validated via secret ballot though. But preliminary data would still be great. Just as the Iraqi data was.
# posted by Paul Edwards @ 19:59 
